At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.
That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.
Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next
No, at least not if you're talking about tractors broadly. The first practical traction engines (~1860) were pretty much instantly revolutionary.
I suppose you could make the claim that the first things commonly called tractors (which were petrol-powered) might not have increased productivity very much, but "tractors on farms" should surely be read as the revolutionary moment, not the change in dominant fuel type 50 years later.
Also, it's likely not safe to read "20% increase in PRs" as "20% productivity improvement".
100%. My engineering teams velocity (and I mean this in terms of bug free, valuable needle moving features shipped) has gone up immensely. TBF it was already a very talented senior group of people, but having that kind of group embrace the tooling for what it is has made a massive difference.
Sorry, I can’t tell if you’re replying to me or to the parent - HN interface is hard to figure out…maybe the parent since it was flagged? - but I assure you that my comment wasn’t satirical in the slightest.
Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."
The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.
